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“Christmas,” the word, comes from the Old English Crīstesmæsse, or literally, “Christ’s Mass” and is festival commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, now observed on December 25. It closes the period of Advent and begins the 12 days of Christmastide, which end after twelfth night. The first recorded date of Christmas being celebrated on December 25th was in 336AD, during the time of the Roman emperor Constantine, the first Christian emperor. A few years later, Pope Julius I officially declared that the birth of Jesus would be celebrated on the 25th of December. Actually, Christ was probably born in the fall of the year. It has been mistakenly believed He was born around the beginning of winter, but according to the Adam Clarke Commentary, it was the Jewish custom to send out their sheep to the deserts at the time of Passover in early spring and bring them home when the first rains began, in in early-to-mid fall. Shepherds watched over them during this time. Since the shepherds had not yet brought their flocks home at the time of Christ’s birth, the event had to have happened sometime in late September. From Luke 2:8: “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.” So how did Christ’s birth come to be celebrated on December 25? This date was chosen because it roughly coincided with various Roman festivals. First there was the idolatrous festival of Saturnalia, a time of merrymaking and exchanging of gifts in early Rome. This occurred each year around the beginning of winter, or the winter solstice, when the sun takes its lowest path across the sky and the days begin to lengthen, assuring another season of growth. Saturnalia, of course, celebrated Saturn—the fire god, and also the god of sowing. Saturn was worshipped in this dead-of-winter festival so he would come back to warm the earth for spring planting. Some of the trappings of the Saturnalia parallel what so many of us do today to celebrate Christmas: decorating homes with greenery, giving gifts, singing songs, and eating special foods. Some Romans worshiped the god Mithra, first found in the Indian Vedic religion as Mitra, 3500 years before the birth of Christ. Interestingly, the Indian Mirta is also a solar deity, being the light and power behind the sun. Mithra was believed to come from a virgin birth, like Christ, and thought by many to have been born on December 25. However, there is no evidence to support this.   In fact, December 25 was considered the birth date of Sol Invictus, literally the “unconquered sun.” Sol Invictus was the official sun god of the later Roman Empire and a patron of soldiers. In 274, the emperor Aurelian made the cult of Sol Invictus one of the traditional Roman cults. For the past two hundred years, it has been generally thought December 25 was chosen for Christmas in order to correspond with the Roman festivals of Saturnalia, Sol Invictus or the birth of Mithra, in order to convince Rome’s pagan citizens to accept Christianity as the empire’s official religion and to promote the church’s identification of God’s son with the celestial sun.           0 0

I wrote a short story a while ago and decided to set it in Pequod. It involves one of the policemen in my first book, Officer John Smith. I’m sending it out as a Christmas present on December 23rd, so stay tuned! 0 0

Author Luccia Gray, she of the fabulous All Hallows at Eyre Hall, has passed on the challenge of telling my blog followers five things they probably don’t know about me. Mmmm, what to tell you? – there are so many fascinating things to relate, I’m such a movie star. Okay, so back to reality. 1. I actually am related to a movie: The Silence of the Lambs. I received a phone call from a friend of mine at the USDA in Beltsville, MD, asking me if I could provide death’s head moths for the movie. He was a beatle guy, and this was out of his comfort zone. Death’s head moths are indigenous to Europe and Asia, but the USDA frowns on the importation of non-native species. However, the animal I used for my research for over 30 years is Manduca sexta, the tobacco hornworm, and it looks pretty similar to the Death’s head moth.         Long story short, I was hired to provide the moths in all three stages – larvae, pupae and adults, for the movie. And I was paid per insect! We made a lighted and heated trunk in which they could be transported with separate compartments for each stage, and various bit part actors on the movie would fly down from Pittsburgh to pick them up. They flew back in a first class seat! I taught the insect wrangler – that’s what they called him – how to get the Manduca to perform, and he glued a clear false finger nail on the thoraces of the adults with a skull painted on to disguise the adults. Oh, and the pupae they removed from the dead girl’s throat? It was a Tootsie Role! 2. In case you didn’t read my Growing Up Pilgrim blog, I know how to card, wash, spin, dye and weave wool (I can also knit and embroider), as well as make soap, bayberry candles, and cook in a fireplace. I’m really good at making steamed black bread, from a recipe in the Plimoth Colony Cookbook. All of these have been very handy in my married life…not! If you’d like to know how to make bayberry candles, check out this video: 3. I love to sail. My first boat was what is now called a Class 10, then it was a Turnabout. It was wooden, heavy, but turned on a dime. Only one sail but later someone figured out how to add a spinnaker. My next sailing adventure was crewing on a Columbia 50 in Lake Erie, named the Res Ipsa Loquitor (lawyer lingo for the Thing Speaks for Itself.) The owner was a lawyer, and he used the boat mainly for assignations. We found lovely things below deck. There were two female crew. We were relegated to spinnaker packing and popping, but weren’t allowed on overnight races because Frank, the cook, liked to work in the nude! Those races suffered from wrapped spinnakers and a lot of cursing. In California, we were qualified to skipper a six meter open hull Shields class – basically a scaled down 12 meter America’s cup boat. No motor, you had to sail her out of the congested Newport harbor , which was an adventure in itself. We had some near misses, once practicing a spinnaker jibe, but the Dainty was fast. Today I have a nimble little 17 foot lady, fast in light wind and wild in a gale. Takes two of us to handle her.   4. My favorite foods, hands down, are lobster and pizza. I usually only eat lobster in Maine where it’s fresh. Lobsters in restaurants in the South have usually been sitting around for a while, are rank-tasting, and don’t have much meat because they’ve been living on their muscle protein. Pizza? Any kind, but I do prefer mine in Chicago – Giordano’s stuffed spinach or veggie pizza or Gino’s deep dish supreme. Heaven!   5. I had polio when I was 12. No lasting effects until I hit my 60s. Now I have some muscle weakness, which is pronounced in my left hip. Check out my post: The Disease That Never Quits. I work out pretty often in a gym and swim every day in the summer; so far I am holding the worst effects at bay.   Thanks, Luccia, for the tag. And my feet are bigger than yours! Do go and visit her blog, Rereading Jane Eyre (lucciagray.com). I’d like to pass this challenge on to Bob Byrd, Elizabeth Hein, Stepheny Houghtlin, Irene Waters, and Rosie Amber. 0 0

For me, part of summer times in Plymouth was always spent learning about and being a Pilgrim. This is taken from a post I wrote in 2014 about Thanksgiving in Plymouth, but fits nicely into my current series. Don’t forget to click on the pictures to enlarge them! Dressed as a Pilgrim girl, I walked in the Pilgrim Progress. These are held on the first four Fridays in August, and local citizens dress as Pilgrims re-creating their procession to church. The number of persons, and their sexes and ages have been matched to the small group of Pilgrims who survived the first winter in the New World. We marched up Leyden Street, to the clicks of tourists’ cameras. Leyden Street was originally called First Street, and the Pilgrims began laying out the street before Christmas in 1620, while they were still living on the Mayflower. Leyden Street is believed to be the oldest continuously inhabited street in the original thirteen British colonies, and it extends from the shore of the harbor to the base of Burial Hill at the top of the street. Leyden Street in the 1800s Rogers, C. H. – Photographer Burial Hill is where the original fort was built. The first settlers built there houses along this street; note the familiar Pilgrim names on the map = Bradford, Brewster, Winslow, Allerton. Town Brook, still bubbling along, is adjacent to the street and provided drinking water for the colonists. Leyden Street has been recreated at Plimoth Plantation. My parents enrolled me before I even hit my teens in classes taught at the Harlow House or the Old Fort House on Sandwich Street, about a half mile from the center of Plymouth. Sandwich Street is the old “heiway” connecting Plymouth with another early settlement, Sandwich, on the Cape. The house is a story and a half dwelling, clad in weathered shingles, with a gambrel roof and a large central chimney. Built in 1677, it is one of the few remaining 17th century buildings in Plymouth. It was built by William Harlow, a cooper, farmer and town official who also served as sergeant of the local militia; he was typical of the responsible, sober and hardworking men who carried on the pilgrim tradition in the second generation of the Plymouth Colony. Harlow was born in England about 1624 and first mentioned in Plymouth town records as a voter in 1646. Widowed twice and married three times, Harlow was the father of fourteen children, and it is generally considered that his house projects the Pilgrim home and way of life. Harlow or Old Fort House Harlow built the house with materials salvaged from the then-derelict fort on Burial Hill and is notable for its hand hewn beams. The interior has been restored and furnished appropriately for the time, and sitting inside with a fire in the fireplace, smelling the aroma of the house’s age, and thinking of the generations who lived there was a special experience. At the Harlow House, I learned how to wash, card and spin wool on the spinning wheel; skein, dye, and weave the wool on a loom, make bayberry candles and soap; cook over the fireplace fire (baked beans, fish cakes, chicken, corn bread.) To young girl, it was occasionally tiresome, but looking back, it was a very special experience. Of course, all of this was designed to create a group of teenagers ready to work as tour guides at various sites in the town. Which brings me to Plimoth Plantation, and recreation of the small farming and maritime community built by the Pilgrims along the shore of Plymouth Harbor as it existed in 1627, seven years after the arrival of Mayflower and just before the colonists began to disperse beyond the walled town and into other parts of what would become southeastern Massachusetts. Plimoth Plantation, another word for colony, was built on land about a quarter mile from my house, land that was very similar to that on which Leyden Street, the fort and Burial Hill were originally located. A reproduction of the Fort house was built at the top of Leyden Street When I was selected to be among the first tour guides there, it was a short ride in my Model A phaeton (my first car) to the parking lot. The first group of potential tour guides took a year-long course on all things Pilgrim before we were let loose on the public. We wore clothes that were designed for us, keeping as close as possible to the original dress. NO BUCKLES on the hats or shoes! The only thing changed was the fabric. The Pilgrims were wool at first, until linen could be woven, and so the powers that be took pity on us and we didn’t have to wear wool in the summer! You probably think the Pilgrims always wore black clothes, but this is not true. First, in the 1620s best clothes were often black, and people wore their best clothes when having their portraits painted. Second, at the time it was not easy to dye cloth a solid, long-lasting black. Thus cloth for everyday clothes was dyed in many colors such as brown, brick red, yellow and blue. Other clothes were made of undyed cloth of gray or white. Everyone wore something around their necks, normally flat collars or kerchiefs of linen, and they all also wore something on their heads – caps of knitted wool or hats of felt with wide brims for protection from the sun and rain. Women and girls pinned their hair up and wore a linen cap over their hair. They would also wear wide brimmed hats over the caps. In cold weather, the Pilgrims wore woolen cloaks or coast with mittens or gloves. Both baby boys and girls wore long, one piece gowns with long sleeves and a cap called a biggens on their heads, made of wool or linen and tied under the chin. A toddler might wear something called a

Posted on November 13, 2014 by The Story Reading Ape Time is like a river. You cannot touch the water twice, because the flow that has passed will never pass again. Enjoy every moment of life. As a bagpiper, I play many gigs. Recently I was asked by a funeral director to play at a graveside service for a homeless man. He had no family or friends, so the service was to be at a pauper’s cemetery in the Nova Scotia back country. As I was not familiar with the backwoods, I got lost and, being a typical man, I didn’t stop for directions. I finally arrived an hour late and saw the funeral guy had evidently gone and the hearse was nowhere in sight. There were only the diggers and crew left and they were eating lunch. I felt badly and apologized to the men for being late. I went to the side of the grave and looked down and the vault lid was already in place. I didn’t know what else to do, so I started to play. The workers put down their lunches and began to gather around. I played out my heart and soul for this man with no family and friends. I played like I’ve never played before for this homeless man. And as I played “Amazing Grace”, the workers began to weep. They wept, I wept, we all wept together. When I finished, I packed up my bagpipes and started for my car. Though my head was hung low, my heart was full. As I opened the door to my car, I heard one of the workers say, “I never seen anything like that before, and I’ve been putting in septic tanks for twenty years.” Apparently, I’m still lost….it’s a man thing. When you have stopped laughing be sure to forward this on to others who would enjoy a good story. 0 0

Here it is! On an icy February morning, Rhe Brewster, an emergency room nurse with a nose for investigation, is called to a dock in the harbor of the small coastal town of Pequod, Maine. A consultant to the Pequod Police Department, Rhe is responding to a discovery by one of the local lobstermen: a finger caught in one of his traps. The subsequent finding of the body of a young girl, wrapped in a sail and without a finger, sends the investigation into high gear and reveals the existence of three other missing girls of the same age, plus a childhood friend of Rhe’s. Battered by increasingly vitriolic objections from her husband, the pregnant Rhe continues her search, dealing with unexpected obstacles and ultimately facing the challenge of crossing an enormous frozen bog to save herself. Will she survive? Is the kidnapper someone she knows? In Death in a Dacron Sail, the second book in the the Rhe Brewster Mystery Series, Rhe’s nerves and endurance are put to the test as the kidnapper’s action hits closer to home. Death in a Dacron Sail will be released in early January. Click on it for a larger view! 0 0

I did a little research on the best time to post a new message on a blog. Turns out it’s Monday morning. So this coming Monday, wait, it’s coming….the cover reveal for my next book, Death in a Dacron Sail! Some friends will be helping me with this, so I can reach east to Europe and West to Australia. See you Monday! 0 0

With the closing of our pool four days ago – hey, I made it to October 30 even though I couldn’t actually swim the last day because the water was so cold – I have to look for other ways to exercise. I can feel my body settling without doing something active every day. So I’ve decided to alternate walking with going to the gym. Today I took my first walk, with our dog Angel. Because I have not been doing long walks, I decided to begin with a relatively short jaunt down our steep, long, twisty driveway, across the road, and down a ways to a trail that winds through the woods, created by the Triangle Land Conservancy. Angel was ecstatic since the walk presented her with a smorgasbord of odors and things to explore, not to mention the chance to pee five hundred times on top of whatever had been left by other dogs on the trail. She maybe 13 years of old (that’s 91 in dog years), but she has more energy than I do and practically dragged me along, wrapping herself around my legs several times. The trail was very faint, covered with leaves, but she managed to find our way. The trail partially runs along a creek that continues flowing east at the bottom of our property. There is a bench about halfway along that overlooks the creek, and at that point we headed back to the road to walk back to our driveway. I took a picture of the creek from the bridge at the bottom of the drive – we are just past peak color this weekend. Then it was the long, steep climb back up to the house, which I wish was at the beginning of the walk and not the end! Angel is taking a long nap his afternoon. 0 0

I want to introduce you to a sister blogger. Her name is Rara and her blog is Rarasaur (http://rarasaur.wordpress.com/). I started following her marvelous writing last year and have continued during her serious legal issues and now her incarceration for a white collar crime. Her husband, Grayson Queen, manages her blog and posts when he gets something from Rara. This one, and the one that follows, touched my heart. Rara is a good person and is dealing with an enormity in her life that most of us could not face with her spirit and equanimity. She wants her posts to be shared, and I hope you see what I see. SOCKS Originally written 08/05/14 On days like this, I miss the moon. She’s been my personal guide for as long as I can remember. In my youth, my small hands would pretend to hold her. I’d sit by the windows—palms bowled together—and whisper my secrets into her light. As a teenager, I’d hunch in the backseat of cars, silently sharing all my thoughts with the bright orb as she followed me down long highways and gravel roads. She has always had a way of magnifying my gratitude and shining perspective on my strife. “It is what it is,” she would smile to me, until her light becomes mine, and my fears become triumphs. They took away my moon, and today, I miss her more than ever. I am disappointed because change didn’t come when I called for it. I planned, and waited, but change didn’t show up. Now I feel stuck—tarred by the moment, feathered by the idiocy of the idea that I had any control of fortuna’s wheel. I feel more trapped by circumstance than when they put me in a cell, and more paused than when they took away time itself. I can see the next part of my journey, but the road from here to there is gated, and until that gate opens, I can do nothing but wait. Plans are meaningless to change, as is disappointment. Change moves as, and when it wants and does not care. My moon would care, though. If I could see her, and whisper the secret of my heart to her, she would soothe it. She would light my journey with her warm glow, and it would remind me of the sanctity of this present moment. She would remind me that planning for change is a skill, waiting patiently for it is a virtue, but embracing the moment is a joy. My moon would urge me to see joy. She would show me that joy was scattered at my feet while I clutched at disappointment—like a little girl crying over a chunk of coal while sitting in a pool of diamonds. In time, that coal will sparkle as brightly, but there is no sense in lamenting over what it is today. It simply is what it is. In my mind, I know all this—but the seed of rational thought only seem to survive the tangles of hurt and fear in my head when they are allowed to bask in moonlight. I feel the comfort struggling to make itself known as I lay on my bunk, staring at the cold cement walls. Then, one of the girls in my room disrupts my thoughts. She is as trapped as I am, and so we are sisters of fate. She asks someone if they want to learn to say something in Spanish, and when the other girl agrees, I smile because I know what’s coming. “Spell socks,” she says. Anticipating a practical joke, the would-be Spanish speaker hesitantly says, “S.O.C.K.S?” And we all laugh. It sounds like, Eso si que es. In Spanish, she has said, “It is what it is.” And there, in the warmth of laughter, the sparkle of wit and the light of sisterhood—I see my moon. Even in here, where I am locked away from the most celestial of sights, she has found a way to lend me her insights. Tomorrow, I might find myself sobbing over coal, but tonight—tonight I will laugh at the wonder of its mere existence, and give gratitude to the diamonds who laugh and sparkle in the bunks around me. Tonight, I will sleep peacefully because, though I have no control of fate, I am not alone. I am surrounded by sisters, and my moon is still following me—healing my hurt—shining her light through them, into me. Dedicated to: Silvia Velez and Alissa Sandoval. DREAM CATCHING AT 11,000 Originally written 08/25/14 In two days—August 27th, 2014—I will turn the big three-oh in the “Big House”—California’s largest state correctional facility for women. I arrived just a week ago and am sitting pretty in receiving, what we colloquially call “A-Yard.” A-Yard is a resting and distribution center, like a train station—filled with women waiting to go somewhere else, smiling uncertainly at each other because the future holds such extreme possibilities in regards to the relationships here. We all know it’s possible that you will never see the woman next to you again. It’s equally possible that you will share—in close proximity and neon orange Technicolor—one of the most memorable experiences of your life with her. Like a train station, it is constantly bustling here. It is saturated with hellos, goodbyes, and the commotion of people trying to live life in a limited amount of time and space. We have tickets, but we call them ducats. We have porters and bright flashing lights that tell the more observant amongst us if everything is running on schedule. Though, of course, it’s not. Like trains, prisons are charmingly—woefully—stuck in the past. The slow-churning relics answer to no one and make no apologies for their pace. There’s no reason they should. After all, it is their very nature. Today, I understand true natures in a way that my 10-year-old self or 20-year-old self never could. This is the sort of insight that grownups brag about when they shake a finger